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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Why Hide Your IP Address?

Unlike many people will tell you, no it is not illegal to mask your IP. As a matter of fact it is a great security precaution that you should take in order to keep things from being traced back to you. The actual act isn't illegal by any means, in the same way that owning a gun is not illegal. All that matters is what you do with it once it is in your possession.

The idea behind hiding your IP is to not allow people to know that it's you. You might be participating in a chatrooom and you don't want people to know exactly where you are from. An IP address can be a very forthcoming piece of information. Not only does it give your general location, if you have a website up, someone can go to a certain website and do a WHOIS on your URL, which will in turn reveal to that person your exact address. This can be a particular annoyance, especially if you are into protecting your own identity.

This also goes for if you are playing a video game, because there are those who will know a way to get your IP address through that. This leads into the question of why exactly you'd want to hide your IP. If you need to gain access to something that is only available to certain countries then you would want to get an IP address masker which replaces your IP with that of another country. If you just need to hide it in general, then you will want to get one that simply generates random IP addresses.

So someone finding your address might not be a terrible thing, admittedly. What can it actually lead to? Well picture someone finding your home address, then going through your garbage to find your credit card information. This can be rather irritating to say the least, so you definitely want to learn how to hide your IP. That's not to say that it will happen every single time, but it could happen enough of the time to make you a little overprotective of your personal information.